Kostecka insists he "never" recommends of endorses specific companies. "If people ask me specific questions I never answer," he explains. Of Brothers's financial status, he says he had no idea: "I don't ask any personal questions about any companies." He claims he was never elected or nominated to any board of directors of Pop-Ins, nor offered to serve in such a capacity.
"I'm a friend of everyone," Kostecka continues. "I speak to over 50 franchise organizations a year. We're not a regulatory agency -- we're promotional. We're trying to encourage people to go into business for themselves. If people misinterpret my general speech, I can't be responsible. I'm trying to help people all over the country, and I've done a very good job. I save people from getting ripped off, and I want to continue doing so."
In the case of Pop-Ins, however, it is clear that at least some people were ripped off -- that, anyway, was the conclusion of Tim Valentine of the Palm Beach prosecutor's office. Still, he decided there was nothing he could really do about it. His investigations had failed to turn up sufficient evidence of fraudulent -- and thus criminal -- intent.
In the end, Valentine settled for writing Brothers a letter of warning, accusing her of "gross mismanagement of an enterprise skirting in the grey area between criminal fraud and a business going sour," and promising to keep his eyes on her. But rather than sending her file to storage after he closed the case, Valentine kept it by his desk. "I knew she'd be back here somewhere down the road," he said.
Carol Brothers didn't disappoint him. With Pop-Ins in bankruptcy, she took her concept to Sid Carr, a Philadelphia businessman and a Palm Beach regular, and convinced him to back a new maid service -- a company she called Snooty's Inc. They planned to open offices around Florida, then find investors to buy Carr out. No franchising, though -- she'd convinced him that was too risky.
But that June, after almost 10 years in the media glare, Brothers received her first bad press about Pop-Ins. "Maid Service's Legal Troubles Soil Dreams of Investors" read the headline in The Palm Beach Post, describing a swath of broken dreams that Brothers had left in her wake: one franchisee driven to thoughts of suicide, another broken in spirit by the fall from an upper-middle-class semiretirement to penury.
Brothers was outraged, particularly by comments attributed to Palm Beach prosecutor Valentine. "I felt it was out of line for a member of a governmental agency to say, 'Brothers could charm the pants off an alligator," she fumed. "I felt that was in very poor taste."
But Brothers's file in Valentine's office continued to grow. There was a complaint from the U.S. Postal Service about a bounced check from Snooty's. Then, early in 1987, came the complaints from Snooty's employees about bounced checks and nonpayment of wages.
"I knew she wasn't a good manager when I hired her," Carr admitted. "But I had made the assumption she could handle it. I talked with Andy Kostecka, who had followed her progress. Andy called her 'a talented gal."
Brothers wasn't so thrilled with Snooty's, either. Late in February of this year, she moved the offices to Worth Avenue, the Rodeo Drive of Florida's gold coast. But it wasn't her boulevard of dreams: she was one of two women in a single room, a second-floor walk-up office, "working in this little maid company, doing nothing." It was a long way from TV appearances, a private plane, and the 1,000-franchise dream.
There was very little glamour in Carol Brothers's life when we met her late this winter -- very little, that is, except the gold Corvette, which had been leased back for her by Sid Carr. She was living just a few blocks from the beach in a two-bedroom apartment, but the ceiling plaster was cracking and the furnishings had a distinctly transient feel. The place could also have used a cleaning, she admitted, but said she couldn't afford a maid -- not on what she took home from Snooty's. The door and windows to the apartment were all kept tightly locked, protection, she said, against the threats she claims to have received from her former franchisees. One even hired some local muscle to show up at her door, she said, posing as a private eye.
"Despite all of this I'm going to come out on top," she insisted at the end of a long interview, the first she has given since the bankruptcy filing. "I'm a survivor."
On February 28, 1987, Snooty's abruptly went out of business, "due to circumstances beyond our control," the telephone answering machine repeated. The demise left at least one investor, the wheelchair-bound owner of a local restaurant, out $5,000 -- more material for Valentine's file.
A few days later, however, Brothers was again starting out fresh, this time at a booth at a franchise fair in West Palm Beach. The sky was overcast, and the air was humid enough to wilt her electric blue dress. For a moment it was like old times. There she stood, green eyes flashing, handing out copies of magazines extolling the joys of franchising, once again pitching the dream.
She'd put Pop-Ins in her past. Now she was selling franchises for Decorating Den Systems, a Maryland-based chain. She didn't call herself Carol Brothers anymore, either. Her new business card read, "Carol Simms, Marketing Executive" . . .
